Trick of the Light (20 page)

The two large German Shepherds that the Countess kept as watchdogs had growled in their kennels but Binnie was silent in movement and possessed the odd attribute of having no body odour. His pores gave nothing away.

He returned by the back stairs, however, not the drainpipe. Alfred Binnie was no monkey.

His unattractive but unthreatening form had been a great boon to him in his chosen and beloved profession; many a body mouldering in the grave, if it ever got to such a resting place, bore witness to the fact that violent death can come from other sources than the belching mouth of cannon.

She watched him as his face smoothed out again till it resembled a nondescript little man, easily overlooked.

Binnie had come highly recommended, laid down a fierce price that would not be haggled over and the Countess, foreseeing the coming war as soon as Simone had deserted, indeed almost welcoming the opportunity, needed a secret card to play.

Needed him badly.

Though now that secret was somewhat compromised.

However, even that she could use to advantage.

The Countess took a thin, crumpled piece of paper from her pocket and placed it before Binnie.

‘This was delivered to me this morning from a trusted source. You are discovered, Mister Binnie.’

He slowly unwrapped the paper to find a crude likeness of his own face staring back.

‘When you poured the acid, you were witnessed,’ she informed him, with a malicious edge. ‘Tut, tut.’

Alfred said nothing but his professional pride was hurt. His speciality was the unseen strike. A witness; that was bad. The drawing was a complication but that proved nothing. The witness was another matter.

‘Who saw me?’ he said quietly.

‘A deaf mute, I am told. Lily Baxter. One of Jean Brash’s impaired whores.’

A slow nod, the eyes blank.

‘She can’t live.’

‘That will be part of the plan. But from now on you must lie low, only out in cover of darkness, no cutting bellies in taverns, no defenestrating.’

A sudden glint of merriment once more in the dark beady eyes; she would keep this little monster close to hand like a dog on a lead.

But now it was time to grease the palm. Was that the phrase? English was such a slippery tongue.

‘Put out your hand,’ she commanded.

‘Which one?’

‘Which do you favour?’

‘The left. Always.’

‘Extend the same.’

An evil little grin spread across the face of Alfred.

‘Are you going to punish me, Countess?’

She said nothing. He extended the hand, and she produced a small leather bag from which she extracted ten gold coins which she dropped one after the other into his upturned palm. A sensuous smile appeared on his face; next to death this was his best pleasure, large women came a poor third at the races.

‘That much again awaits,’ she promised, herself excited by the quickening in her own being. ‘When we have executed what is in my mind. This night.’

Alfred caught her bloodlust, you could almost taste it; pity she was such a scrawny type.

‘This seems acceptable,’ he said chastely.

‘You will be a good boy till then?’

‘You have my word,’ he replied, as he pocketed the coins, ‘but tonight, I will be a very bad boy.’

They sat and stared at each other like two perfect embodiments of evil intent until the Countess smiled over a random thought of impending destruction.

‘Do you enjoy long, slow suffering?’ she remarked.

‘If there’s blood involved.’

That response brought a slight frown to her face and she was moved to more precise definition of their objective.

‘The most exquisite torture is in the mind. We may throw in a bit of blood to keep you happy.’

‘I like being happy,’ he replied simply.

For a moment she gazed at him with a curious fondness.

‘You are most valuable to me, Mister Binnie. I shall take
very
good care of you.’

‘I don’t like Scotch beer.’

‘I shall find you another kind.’

‘And I like
big
women. Something I can find in the dark.’

‘I will search out such a magnitude.’

‘Then we have an agreement, Countess,’ said Binnie with solemn gravity.

‘We have an agreement, Mister Binnie.’

They each then retreated to their thoughts, his of the victim’s surprise and fear, hers of the delights to come.

21

I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.

S
AMUEL
P
EPYS
,
Diary
(13 October, 1660)

James McLevy had seen some messy corpses in his time but this one took the biscuit.

Strangely enough the trunk and limbs were untouched save for the fragments of gore and splinters of bone that had spattered over the respectable garmentation.

The body encased and covered in a heavy suit as custom demanded, the shoes shiny, though dull red drops had given birth to thin rivulets which trickled down until they had been arrested by the edging sole of a solid brogue.

Everything was fine until you got above the neck.

Then it was as if someone had dropped a huge blancmange, the flesh split, and the bones crushed to a pulp.

It was hardly recognisable as a human head and so far the inspector had hardly been able to find an eyeball that he could call his own.

Constable Ballantyne, thrilled at being included in his first murder investigation, though merely there to stand and watch, stood, watched, and then bolted outside to boak his breakfast up all over the street.

The other two young green-faced constables had been dismissed to join Ballantyne lest they spewed precipitously and obliterated evidence.

Mulholland, who had looked but not boaked, was in the higher reaches of the house in search of forcible entry because nothing indicated such below.

It was just how McLevy liked it.

Him and a corpse.

Plus the word.

Daubed in blood on the wall above the mantelpiece, the letters crude and misshapen but the word clear enough.

JUDAS
.

How that applied to the dead Gilbert Morrison was a mystery to be solved. He had been thus identified by Fergus MacLean through his clothing and a scar across the palm of his hand, the result of an accident on board a ship when a sharp metal shackle had broken free from the chain cable and cut the maister’s hand.

Long ago. But the mark remained.

Like that of Cain.

McLevy had known the man and hadn’t liked him. Avaricious, cruel-eyed, thin-lipped, a dry stick of rectitude.

None of that left now.

Not a shred.

The inspector carefully skirted the huddle of fleshly remains and bent over what appeared to be the implement of destruction. A heavy iron poker, the lower third of which had the metal twisted round in a spiral so that when thrust it might worm itself into the coals.

The whirling indentation had retained fragments of tissue that might be useful, although there was enough to be going on with, scattered all around.

He peered at the weapon and produced a magnifier to squint through but there were no foreign substances and only smears of blood upon the handle.

McLevy had read recently in the scientific journal
Nature
an article by a physician – Scots of course – Henry Faulds, suggesting that fingerprints might one day be used to identify the perpetrators of crime. The inspector looked forward to that prospect though it was still a distance off. One day. Loops and whorls.

Though there was nothing on the handle of the poker but red smudges, whoever had wielded it with such ferocious purpose might well have worn a hand covering of some kind. A strange contradiction; the crime suggested mindless violence but was there an element of calculation involved?

He placed the poker aside neatly, to be wrapped up and scrutinised later at the station, then moved to the mantelpiece with his magnifier.

JUDAS
. Very biblical. The betrayer of Jesus. That suggested vengeance. But who had been betrayed?

And who desired vengeance?

He bent down, and using the magnifier, carefully scanned the fireplace, grunting a little as his body did not take to folding over in such fashion. By the side of the grate, his painstaking search uncovered a thin strand of hair. He fished it out between finger and thumb then raised it up to the light.

Indeed it was human filament but not the servant’s or Morrison’s. Fergus was white haired and the deceased Gilbert, from McLevy’s memory, had few hairs if any, a bald pate like a monk – it must have made a fine target.

But this was long, darkish in colour as far as he could tell and, under the magnifier, perhaps even a little wavy.

He sniffed at the hair and then his fingers. An acrid trace of ash from the fireplace but something else as well.

So faint as to be near unidentifiable. A pomade of sorts? Hard to tell. McLevy’s eyes were not the best but his nose was infallible; possibly some oiling agent, some unguent? The odour though, what was it?

Honey? A sweet smell but fading even as he sniffed; he was lucky it had lasted this long. He would store it in his olfactory bank and hope for a similar waft someday.

McLevy diligently placed the hair into some thin paper and deposited it into the evidence bag.

Man or woman? Long enough for either but he would wager a man.

His little secret for the nonce.

Mulholland entered and McLevy turned; they spoke across the crushed cadaver as if it had no meaning or life, which latter indeed was true enough.

A necessary callousness becomes the good policeman; too much sensitivity and you’d never get anything done.

‘Came in through the skylight, wrenched the thing right off its hinges. No mark of a tool. Bare hands.’

Having announced this, Mulholland demonstrated the action somewhat dramatically for he had been impressed by the mangled frame still propped against the chimneybreast.

‘That takes a bit of doing,’ muttered the inspector.

‘You should see it.’

‘I intend to.’

Both men then looked at the corpse as if it might contribute to the discussion.

‘Find anything?’ Mulholland asked.

‘Looks like murder,’ was the answer.

A glint of gallows humour but there was no gainsaying the fact that this was a crime with a strange supernatural bent as if some berserk elemental force had come in to wreak havoc and vengeance.

Mulholland looked at the name on the wall.

‘Judas,’ McLevy remarked. ‘Gets the blame for everything.’

‘Something from the past caught up with Mister Morrison?’

‘Possible. We’ll dig it up and see.’

Morrison had the reputation of a ruthless swine who would sell his granny for a profit, or at the very least put her on a tramp steamer.

This, however, was beyond natural retribution.

This was violent death, intense and savage.

The constable shivered slightly.

‘Whatever did the deed, I wouldn’t want to meet the same without a revolver to hand.’

‘Not even your hornbeam stick?’

‘Not even that.’

‘Near Halloween. Maybe the devil paid a visit.’

While they had been almost idly discoursing both had been sweeping the room with their eyes to see if anything besides the fairly obvious carcass was awry, but nothing seemed out of place.

Just the dead body.

All the mayhem had been localised.

‘The poker is the murder weapon.’

‘I noticed that.’

‘But did you observe the angle of the neck?’

‘No. You sent me to skies above.’

‘Observe it now.’

The constable collapsed his lanky frame somewhat like a giraffe getting to its knees and gazed at the columnar connection between the trunk and smithereens on top.

Oddly enough, though the head was smashed to bits the neck remained intact. Reasonably.

‘Snapped clean,’ he announced.

‘Uhuh. I would wager before the attack upon the face.’

‘He was dead already?’

‘That’s my contention.’

This put a different complexion on the event. A mixture of explosive ferocity and deliberate intent.

McLevy also knelt and then took out a flat leather pouch from which he extracted a thin metal rod with a delicate sharp point. One of a matching set of lock-picks that had mysteriously found its way into his possession and which he had put to many uses.

He used this one to scrape under the nails of the dead hand, finding imbedded beneath first and second fingerplates fragmentary scraps of a stiff, dark blue material.

Mulholland took one and held it up to the light while McLevy sniffed at the other, on guard lest it disappear up his nose.

‘Tarry,’ he opined.

‘Scraped off – but from what?’

Then Mulholland had a sudden thought and answered his own question.

‘Gauntlets, perhaps? To protect and leave no trace?’

‘But they did,’ said McLevy. ‘And it’s the protection that interests me.’

Again he was struck by the contrast of animal fury and careful planning.

Also something that had been nagging at him since the sighting of the body had just fallen into place; probably it possessed no relevance but the inspector was a great believer in random slices of the brain.

‘I once saw a victim as bad smashed as this but it was a bullet had done the trick. Shot from close. Down by the docks. I was a constable then. Not my case.’

‘That wouldn’t be yesterday.’

‘No. It was not. We never did find the killer.’

The inspector seemed lost in reverie and Mulholland knew better than to disturb him. Finally though McLevy shook his head and put the scraps away in his evidence bag.

‘Let’s hope we have better luck this time,’ he said.

The door opened and an ashen-faced Ballantyne entered, holding something low down by his side.